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Àngels Barceló: “I am hyper-competitive and hyper-ambitious”

2022-05-22T21:52:34.970Z


The journalist confesses that her three years at the helm of 'Hoy por hoy' on Cadena SER have aged her 30 and announces that she is working "with a pick and shovel" so that the program grows "strong and healthy" after a few frenetic seasons


We meet at six in the afternoon, with a sun that cracks in Madrid, although for her it is almost dinner time.

She wakes up at 3:59 in the morning to listen to the 4 o'clock “

ticket

” on SER, which has so many times knocked down the script for

Hoy por Hoy

(HxH), the morning show she has directed for three years.

She comes from a pilates class, her "only free hour" of the day, in which she disconnects from current affairs and only thinks about "inhaling, exhaling and controlling the body."

In the middle of the conversation, she receives a mobile call from work, which she dispatches quickly, but her smile changes.

She reminded her of the last time we spoke, in 2008, when she took over the management of the nightclub

Hora 25

.

She came then from directing the "gentle" magazine

To live that there are two days

, on the weekend, and she confessed "relaxed", having discovered that there is life beyond work.

She has rained ever since.

Even stones.

Ask.

After the oasis of the weekend she returned to the galleys.

How did you handle the change?

Response.

I returned to daily information, what I have been doing all my life.

It was not difficult for me to gain muscle, because I am very happy doing this.

I have been examining myself daily since I was 20 years old.

The new thing is that I have learned to disconnect and calm down.

That has given me age.

You can't spend your whole life with this level of stress.

I am at a very dangerous age, many people around me have had serious health scares, and I think about it more and more.

Francino [Carles, director of

La Ventana

] tells me a lot: they shoot closer and closer.

Q.

Pandemic.

'Filomena'.

La Palma volcano.

Ukraine.

These three years have been heart-stopping.

R.

And you leave the

hacking

that we suffered in the radio and that left us working on pedals.

He has been giddy.

Three years of

Hoy por Hoy

have aged me 30. I've gone gray live.

I joke with Emilio Arellano, our outdoor technician, that each new gray hair that comes out has the name of a crisis.

Now is when I start to make the program I want.

Q.

Is your

Today for today

in mantillas?

A.

Totally.

So far we have done survival, anxiety programs.

It is also true that, if you can with this, you can with everything.

There have been days of six hours alone in the studio.

We have been pick and shovel, and we continue to pick so that the child grows strong and healthy.

P.

He says that he likes that they knock down the script

in extremis

.

How do you metabolize so much cortisol?

A.

That is wonderful.

I like to go into the studio with nothing.

They are the easiest programs to do, when everything is happening, everything is alive, people enter live.

It happened with Ukraine.

At 4 I found out about the invasion, with the

ticket

.

And people began to come, to organize us and tell everything live.

P.

Did you not hesitate to go to cover that crisis on the ground?

A.

The other way around.

She had been in other wars, but not one like this.

Making toppings is what I like the most.

In the war or downstairs in the studio, on the Gran Vía. I've been tied to a table for years, but that urge hasn't gone away.

If it were up to me, I'd be telling things from the outside all day.

Q.

How do you choose your collaborators?

R.

I have a nose for detecting talent.

I prefer the one who wants to work than the one who thinks he knows everything.

First, because that way I can mold them in my own way...

P... What you want are

Barcelonars.

R.

Call it that, yes: that they learn to work as I like and that way we will understand each other.

A boss told me that, more than my team, it was my sect.

I buy.

I want people who like to work with me.

I am neither better nor worse than another, but I have my things, and I like that my people give their lives for me.

In a figurative sense, of course.

Q.

They are so young, most of them.

R.

For a long time I was the smallest of the teams.

I started presenting a news program on TV when I was 20 years old.

Then everyone got younger.

I need youth because they are more inventive, they have more ideas, they are less afraid of things, they dominate technology.

There are few professionals of my age left in the media, and that is also a mistake.

Q.

Being the biggest nuisance?

R.

No, because the people who are now starting in the profession are not going to live what I have lived.

Being able to practice journalism with the media, and when the relationship with power was different.

They will have it easier in other things, but not in exercising journalism as I understand it.

I have done it from the rigor, decency and honesty.

I don't have any bad taste in my mouth.

Here I am, 58 years old.

P.

How is that relationship with power now?

R.

Well, in many cases, of friendship, when not collusion.

Almost all the blame for the disrepute of the trade is ours.

We have put journalism in a loop of

hooliganism

that is not what I prepared myself for.

Now we see journalists who go to politics and vice versa.

Borders have been crossed in both directions and that has done the profession a disservice.

I am not a friend of any politician.

I think that distance is good for journalism.

Q.

Do some of you leave

raw

from the interviews?

A.

Many.

More and more they know how to go raw.

If they don't want to, they don't answer.

It doesn't matter if you cross-examine them, if you expose them, they don't answer.

At first I was much more pissed off than now.

It's not that I've given up, but I think we're not going to make it.

Q.

Has it been folded?

R.

Yes. And not so long ago.

You know it, they deny it to you, and you save it for the next time you know where they are going.

P.

Sometimes you notice everything in the tone on the radio.

Editorializes with the voice, as well as with the word.

R.

The voice is the tool we have on the radio for everything.

To editorialize and, above all, to convey emotions.

It's the only way you have.

And I do nothing to soften my emotions.

Neither at work nor in life.

Right now, for example, I'm pissed off with the call I received.

That's why I hung up early.

I'm counting to one hundred.

P.

And silence, what is the use?

R.

Silence for me is the emotion on the radio.

Radio is very, very emotional.

Much more than TV, and someone who has been on TV for many years tells you.

I have never liked people who cry or break on the air, but in this time of pandemic it has been very, very difficult not to break.

That, yes, sometimes you leave the program as if you had been hit by a truck.

P.

Do you feel pressured by the audience data?

A.

Yes. So much so that I left television for that reason.

I did not want to live under the mandate of the audience, and I saw myself, at a certain moment, configuring the rundown based on it and not on my journalistic criteria.

On the radio, of course you take it into account, but you can also say no.

I think we make an honest, rigorous radio, we don't yell.

I only know how to do this, and if one day someone thinks that to have more audience you have to do other things, I will do the same as on TV: I will leave.

Q.

And does the competition influence you?

R.

I do not ignore it, never.

I always look at what they do, and if I see that there is something that works for them, I think.

why?

There will be things that don't interest me and there they are, but there will be others that I can learn from.

Q.

How much do critics sting?

R.

The insult.

The extreme right of Vox, calling me red, activist and that kind of thing, zero.

The criticism that insults on the networks, no.

I only participate in debates with the people I love, and where people insult me, I am not interested in the least.

The criticism of people who I consider to have criteria influences me and, above all, it pisses me off, I get angry with myself, because I never want to do anything wrong.

P.

Is it bad to lose?

R.

I am hypercompetitive and hyperambitious.

But that doesn't have to be negative.

I want to be the best in everything I do, in everything.

P.

Also in pilates?

A.

Also.

And when I stop doing things, I want to be the best at doing nothing.

If I do something, I do it.

If not, I don't wear.

But if I do, I want to be the best.

Q.

Admit a mistake to me.

A.

Hmm.

I'm so good... [laughs]

Q.

An imperfection.

R.

I am too obsessive with work, and that has sometimes prevented me from enjoying other things, and putting my personal life on hold, leaving it in the background.

Q.

Do you yearn to have spent more time with your daughter, for example?

R.

I

abandoned

my daughter when she was three years old, that word is so strong that sometimes I have had to hear it, and I came to work in Madrid and she stayed in Barcelona, ​​and we saw each other on weekends.

Sometimes I think about what life would have been like if she had done something else, and I come to the conclusion that I wouldn't have been as happy, and probably my family wouldn't have been either.

We spent the confinement together, and she, who was teleworking at home, collected the bill for all the years that I was an absent mother, for all the times that I did not go to school, to the carnival.

It was wonderful.

Q.

You have been working in the media in front of and behind the screen for almost 40 years.

Has she ever experienced uncomfortable situations because she is a woman?

R.

Yes. I started very young and, then, a young woman was the same as a target for certain politicians, sources, bosses and colleagues.

Of course I have experienced uncomfortable situations.

They always think that they can charm you more easily than men, that they can screw you even more bent than them.

P.

You are the only woman director of a radio program in the section of pure and hard information in the morning.

Do you think there is a gender bias in that strip?

R.

No, if there is bias, it is ideological.

We've heard progressive women say things I never thought they could say.

It makes me very angry to restart debates that we had already overcome and that I thought we could only move forward.

The other day I started the 8 o'clock editorial saying: let's not take for granted any right, in general, nor any of the women in particular, just as things are going in this country with the rise of the extreme right.

There I do not hide my anger.

Never.

'TODAY FOR TODAY' AND TOMORROW

Àngels Barceló (Barcelona, ​​58 years old) has been "examining" himself daily before the audience since he was 20 years old, since he began to present a news program on television in Catalonia, without even having finished his Journalism degree.

Since then, she is "tied" to the table of the presentation and direction of TV and radio programs, although she has also covered national and international crises, which she likes most about the profession.

She confesses that the worst news she has had to give live was the death of her colleague and friend José Couso, in Iraq, and the best, the end of the ETA terrorist attacks.

She took over the direction of 'Hoy por Hoy', the great morning program of Cadena SER in the fall of 2019. Shortly after, the pandemic broke out and all the catastrophes that have followed it.

Only now, she confesses she,

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Source: elparis

All news articles on 2022-05-22

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